— Maria Allen

So you can go to your local store wherever you shop, and you can buy a low end plastic, um, uh, food dehydrator, and it will do the trick, but it won't do it efficiently. So that's the first thing I'm going to say. So after I finished my Rouxbe course and I fell in love with dehydrating, especially making seed crackers and dehydrated cherry tomatoes, uh, because they added so much flavor and color and texture to a dish. So I went on the Facebook for sale site and I ended up meeting a woman in a parking lot of a shopping center, and I paid $100 for her Xca and Excalibur is sort of like the Cadillac or Rolls Royce of dehydrator. And it was a five shelf, which was exactly what I needed because a food dehydrator is rather big. They're usually about 18 inches by 18 inches, and they take up a lot of space in your kitchen. It's efficient. It, it's remarkable. If it says something's going to dehydrate in 18 hours, it's going to dehydrate in 18 hours. Today my food dehydrator is in my basement in its box, and I use it maybe two or three times a year. The next thing is, before I even had a food dehydrator, I would put my oven on its lowest temp, and then I would dehydrate in my own oven. So I would suggest to take a look at that little booklet that comes with your oven and see if you can, in fact, dehydrate. If you're going to buy an Excalibur, that's a decision that you have to make. They run in the arena of about $300. If I were, um, a raw chef, I would definitely probably have two of them. So I think that it's a decision that you have to make and a decision if you believe that the use of an Excalibur or any kind of dehydrator will fill into your, will fit into your lifestyle.